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[Robert E Dickinson]

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Tuesday, August 5, 2008
One More?

05 Aug 2008 07:31 pm

Ursamajorrising

Whitman, of course:

After the dazzle of day is gone,
Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars;
After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band,
Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.

(Photo: Ursa Major Rising by Phil Hart.)

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The Suskind "Forgery"

05 Aug 2008 07:04 pm

A reader writes:

I harbor no ill will towards Suskind, but I'm calling bullshit.

A) The Bush administration is not a John Grisham novel. People do not order the CIA to break the law on creak colored White House stationary. If this sort of thing is done, it's not done with a paper trail

B) Reporting at the time on the Con Coughlin story, or rather a month later, pinned the intel on Atta in the camp on Iyad Allawi. That doesn't rule out the White House per se, but remember according to the Suskind narrative its the White House that backs Chalabi and the agency and MI6 that backs Allawi. See this entry from Juan Cole here.

Continue reading "The Suskind "Forgery"" »

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Olympic Torches

05 Aug 2008 06:59 pm

A really cool interactive graphic about torches through the ages from the NYT. The biggies are getting much better at figuring out what the web can bring to journalism.

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The Iranian Bomb

05 Aug 2008 05:57 pm

I suggested that the world could live with it - certainly in a way that many Israelis feel they cannot. The judgment required to determine if a fanatically theocratic regime can indeed be trusted with that kind of power is an excruciatingly nuanced one, especially since the alternative - a pre-emptive strike - is so fraught with peril. There are no great options in front of us. But Jeffrey Goldberg moves the goal-posts further in his latest post, trying to forge a debate about Iran's nuclear capacity beyond the Israel question alone. Money quote:

Can we really live with a Middle East that has eight or ten nuclear powers? And will our allies succumb to Iranian pressure and one day line-up against us? Right now, we have enormous influence in the Gulf states, influence that helps us fight terrorism and assure the smooth flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. All this changes if Iran becomes a proven nuclear power. Our Gulf allies will have to make impossible choices, between the country that has guaranteed order in their region, and the rising Shia power.

Something else changes: Terrorist groups that threaten, or have threatened, American targets - terrorists in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon - will come under the protection of the Iranian nuclear umbrella.

Continue reading "The Iranian Bomb" »

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Unstarry Night, Ctd.

05 Aug 2008 05:16 pm

One reader - who works in Big Bend National Park in Texas - sent the photo below from his "work-place" and one sent this poem by Emily Dickinson, "We grow accustomed to the Dark":

Nightskyrobbersroost1_2 We grow accustomed to the Dark—
When light is put away—
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye—

A Moment—We uncertain step
For newness of the night—
Then—fit our Vision to the Dark—
And meet the Road—erect—

And so of larger—Darkness—
Those Evenings of the Brain—
When not a Moon disclose a sign—
Or Star—come out—within—

The Bravest—grope a little—
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead—
But as they learn to see—

Either the Darkness alters—
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight—
And Life steps almost straight.

This poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, also sent in by a reader, is another classic:

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Continue reading "Unstarry Night, Ctd." »

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World War I In Mappage

05 Aug 2008 04:55 pm

2721592095_f9ccd02810

Bibilodyssey has complied a fantastic series of satirical cartoon-maps from various artists depicting the slaughter of the First World War. I have a feeling Niall Ferguson would love the one above.

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Mental Health Break

05 Aug 2008 04:20 pm

Mozart meets phone tone:

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Lieberman's Problem

05 Aug 2008 03:52 pm

My new colleague, Ta-Nehisi Coates - welcome! - pulls up this helpful quote in understanding McCain's biggest backer, Joe Lieberman:

"Lieberman's problem is not that he supported the Iraq invasion, nor that he thinks we need to stay in and finish the job," Suzanne Nossel, a young ex-State Department official and a fellow at a think tank called the Security and Peace Initiative, wrote the other day. "He has lots of mainstream Democratic company in both those positions. The crux of Lieberman's problem is his unwillingness to acknowledge the severity of what's happened in Iraq, and to demand accountability for it."

Put like that, Lieberman is a pretty good stand-in for a lot of other pro-war types who are now hailing the decline in US casualties as "victory" in Iraq. Their victory dance would be a little less galling if there was any serious accounting of the strategic blunders, tactical errors and moral crimes of the last five years, and even the slightest acknowledgment of the enormous ongoing costs of occupying that country for the indefinite future. Instead we get cheer-leading like this from Bret Stephens:

Saddam is dead. Had he remained in power, we would likely still believe he had WMD. He would have been sitting on an oil bonanza priced at $140 a barrel.

Continue reading "Lieberman's Problem" »

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Malkin Award Nominee

05 Aug 2008 03:21 pm

"So you will now say - I hear the voice of an ACLU member - Dennis, do you think that this guy should have shot these people spray painting grafiti on his shop. To which my answer is yes. I do. No to kill. Not to kill. But if he shot them in the legs or in the arms I would have considered the man one of the great advancers of civilization in my time. And that is what divides left from right. Because anybody on the left hearing this would think that this is barbaric whereas I consider not stopping these people in any way that is necessary to be barbaric," - Dennis Prager, on his radio show (hour 3, around 8:41 in).

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Courthouse Confessions

05 Aug 2008 02:50 pm

Blog

An intrepid photo-blogger, Steven Hirsch, camps out in front of the Manhattan Criminal Court and photographs the people leaving. He asks them for their stories. The photos are brilliant; the confessions occasionally very sad. The dude above says he was arrested for peeing in public.

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Cindy as "Miss Buffalo Chip"

05 Aug 2008 02:41 pm

She must have loved that McCain line. Again: imagine if Obama had said something like that abut Michelle.

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Toby Keith On Barack Obama

05 Aug 2008 02:39 pm

The white man says the black man is acting white.

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Making Musical Fun Of Nazis

05 Aug 2008 02:38 pm

I posted the Hitler-Jeffersons number. That kind of thing has an ancient pedigree and the Brits got there first (not to speak of Chaplin, of course).

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Enthused For Cheney

05 Aug 2008 02:34 pm

How can a devout Catholic who believes church doctrine should be the last word on public policy be enthusiastic for a vice-president who personally authorized the torture of countless human beings? Sometimes these theocons just baffle me. Do any of them have the integrity of Mark Shea?

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The Power of Oprah

05 Aug 2008 02:05 pm

A new academic study argues she got Obama a million extra votes in the primaries.

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Why Cover The Edwards Story?

05 Aug 2008 01:46 pm

Mickey makes his case for an unsqueamish press. I think the reason the MSM is leery of this story is because someone else has actually claimed to be the father of the child in question and because Elizabeth Edwards is extremely sick, and this story would be an horribly traumatizing question for a cancer patient to deal with. And there's enough to this story already to bar any near-future public office for Edwards.

So, yes, occasionally the press is humane. Sometimes, that's a good thing.

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Cool Ad Watch

05 Aug 2008 01:31 pm

Yes, this is for chocolate and it was immensely successful. Marbury thinks it contains Obama's secret:

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Obama-Porn

05 Aug 2008 01:16 pm

You know you want you some.

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The Tire Gauge Solution

05 Aug 2008 12:52 pm

Let Limbaugh mock:

The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day by 2030. We use about 20 million bbl. per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now. Meanwhile, efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points. In other words: Obama is right.

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The View From Your Window

05 Aug 2008 12:33 pm

Chicagoillinois130pm

Chicago, Illinois, 1.30 pm.

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Quote For The Day

05 Aug 2008 11:55 am

"I don't know if you know this. John McCain is looking for someone for vice president who has more economic expertise than he does. So congratulations to all of you, you’re on the short list," - John Kerry.

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Co-Opting Jefferson

05 Aug 2008 11:50 am

John Yoo's latest self-defense.

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Postmodernism In A Nutshell

05 Aug 2008 11:46 am

Leave it to Jonah:

An explosive fad in the 1980s, postmodernism was and is an enormous intellectual hustle in which left-wing intellectuals take crowbars and pick axes to anything having to do with the civilizational Mount Rushmore of Dead White European Males.

Philosophy is easy when you know nothing about it, isn't it?

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DarkSky.org

05 Aug 2008 11:39 am

Who knew? There is an organization dedicated to "giving back the night." And there's an imminent conference on the subject in Vienna.

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Racism and Obama II

05 Aug 2008 11:19 am

Some smart observations from Publius:

I’m a child of the rural South. But you know what? Actual racism is a lot less common there — we have a ways to go, but there has been real progress on that front. The more serious problem is white resentment. A lot of white people honestly think they have been significantly deprived of various things because of minorities. And it’s hard to overstate how deeply these feelings run.

It’s not so much animosity toward people who are different — it’s the animosity of the aggrieved. They feel like they are the victims. That’s why race is a losing issue for Obama — it’s not so much that people are racist, but that they feel they are being punished because they’re white (yes, I know how completely absurd this must sound to the black community).

This is the poisoned fruit of that poisonous, if well-intentioned, policy of affirmative action.

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Dissent Of The Day

05 Aug 2008 11:02 am

A reader writes:

Can we not equate negative ads on issues (energy) with negative ads on character (celebrity)? Obama comes out an hits McCain on energy, sure it's negative, but it's above the belt. McCain is just peddling trash.

Frankly, I think the voters will see through it, just as they did in the primary. Every response from the Clinton campaign to a negative Obama statement was "what happened to the politics of hope?" and it just didn't do anything, because they went personal. And it's not as if Obama can't get dirty, the health care mailers in the primary seemed particularly low (in a Dem on Dem race that is). However, it was almost always about policy.

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The Suskind Letter

05 Aug 2008 11:01 am

The second half of the allegedly forged document is even more interesting.

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Unstarry Night, Ctd.

05 Aug 2008 10:28 am

Before Emerson and Asimov, and Auden, there was Aristotle, as recalled by Cicero: “

So Aristotle says brilliantly: If there were men who had always lived underground in fine and well-lit houses which had been adorned with statues and paintings, and equipped with all the things which those who are considered well-to-do possess in abundance, who had, however, never come forth into the upper world, but had learned by fame and hearsay of the existence of certain divine powers and natures, and had then at some time, through the jaws of the earth being opened, been able to come forth from those hidden regions,

Continue reading "Unstarry Night, Ctd." »

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Obamacon Watch

05 Aug 2008 09:59 am

A Republican defects in Oregon.

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In Defense Of Sexual Harassment

05 Aug 2008 09:51 am

Leave it to the Russians.

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Why Is The Race So Close?

05 Aug 2008 09:31 am

Obamaracesemmanueldunandafpgetty

It's a good question, and David Brooks offers a perceptive psychological explanation today. Obama, Brooks argues, is a peripatetic, picaresque character, migrating from one place to another and from one institution to another without ever fully belonging to any. This disconcerts those voters who like their leaders rooted. And maybe David's onto something. As a geographically transplanted founding member of the post-boomer meritocratic elite, I'm not the most objective observer here. There may also be residual race-consciousness at work or simply guardedness about Obama's relative Washington inexperience.

But I'd add two more factors to the mix. The first is Iraq. The swift decline in violence and chaos there has changed the debate from purely how to get out as swiftly as possible and cut our losses (or sustain a grueling endless conflict) to what are the costs and benefits of staying longer or leaving sooner, and the tactics of each option. Obama's candidacy soared in response to a foreign policy catastrophe all his serious opponents supported at the start. The catastrophe endures, of course, and the financial costs of continued enmeshment grow all the time. But the sharp decline in deaths of Americans has done what McCain needed: it has given the neo-imperial project a new lease on life. We are now told, for example, by three of the proponents of the war that we cannot even begin major drawdowns until 2010. And if chaos or unrest continue or increase by then, well, we'll have to wait some more, won't we? If the criterion for departure is a peaceful, unified Iraq, we could be there as long as the British once were. McCain's previous position was to hang in while Iraq continued to burn. His new position is to hang in and somehow turn a strategic blunder into a strategic success (even if no sane person, knowing what we know now, would have begun this thing in the first place). This is a much, much better place for McCain to be than he was just five months ago. Still not great; but no longer awful.

The second factor, I'd argue, is, paradoxically, Democratic strength.

Continue reading "Why Is The Race So Close?" »

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A Forgery Charge

05 Aug 2008 09:30 am

If true, an impeachable offense - and an indication that the bad faith many suspect was behind the Iraq invasion was real:

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.

Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.

The author also claims that the Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official “that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.”

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Racism and Obama

05 Aug 2008 08:38 am

It's hard, I think, to get too gloomy about racial attitudes in this country when you see how competitive the black candidate still is in the South. Yes, I know there's a big black vote out there, but still ...

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The Art Of Subtitling

05 Aug 2008 08:02 am

Not so easy:

With films like these I often feel like I am some sort of firefighter trying to salvage as much as I can from an immense burning mansion. You take out the expensive furniture and artwork and all the people and you leave behind the wallpaper, the rugs, the goldfish tank and the occasional poodle. Sorry, folks, no time.”

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The Horse Race

05 Aug 2008 07:46 am

A typically shrewd comment from Ross:

Races can be close without being all that fluid, and the fact that McCain rarely drops more than five points behind Obama may be precisely the thing that keeps his campaign from taking the kind of gambles - like, say, a one-term pledge - that he needs to get to fifty percent, or to 270.

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Exhuming Newman, Ctd

05 Aug 2008 07:15 am

A reader writes:

There is an emphatic precedent. St. Robert Bellarmine (like Newman, a violinist and esthete, voluminous writer and brilliant polemicist) instructed that he be buried with his young, wildly attractive student St. Aloysius Gonzaga (who, before his death, changed his name to Robert), with whose body his remains to this day. They even moved Aloysius' body to the Church of St. Ignatius to put them together in a place of particular honor.

But of course their canonizations occurred before the current witch-hunts.

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Monday, August 4, 2008
Unstarry Night, Ctd.

04 Aug 2008 09:59 pm

Starry

You won't let it go. And why should you? A reader writes:

Do you recall the last stanza of W. H. Auden’s poem, “The More Loving One”? It goes like this:

“Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.”

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Move Over, iPhone

04 Aug 2008 09:43 pm

Someone has a simpler concept.

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UnStarry Night, Again

04 Aug 2008 09:11 pm

Emerson's quote inspired a short story by Isaac Asimov. With a slightly different twist.

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Barnett On Brooks

04 Aug 2008 07:52 pm

Yes, it was not one of David's best efforts.

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"Suck It Up"

04 Aug 2008 07:51 pm

Sane words from Steve Chapman on our oil and real estate woes:

When the economy contracts, the government may use sound monetary and fiscal policy to help revive growth. But when wealth goes up in smoke, the government can't necessarily bring it back. If it tries, the effect is likely to resemble what happens when you give a recovering alcoholic a drink: deceptively pleasant at first, but ultimately calamitous.

Meanwhile, Obama and McCain are playing the kind of politics that will only make things worse.

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Going Negative On McCain

04 Aug 2008 07:05 pm

This Obama ad suggests he's not going to play pretty. Kevin Drum is impressed:

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Same As It Ever Was?

04 Aug 2008 06:42 pm

A reader writes:

I recently read these arguments against a presidential candidate:

..."decried as a hopeless visionary, a weakling... more a Frenchman than an American, and therefore a bad man."

"Not only was [he] a godless man, but one who mocked the Christian faith."

"With [him] we shall have peace... the friends of war will vote for [the opponent]."

I removed the names - they aren't about Barack Obama against John McCain, but about Thomas Jefferson against John Adams in the election of 1800. (I've been reading David McCullough's "John Adams", several years too late.) There are an alarming number that sound like they came straight from this election: Adams was mocked for being old. Jefferson was considered a man of the people despite coming from a wealthy background. Adams was considered "elite" despite having more humble beginnings. They are both criticized for having questionable associates.


Sort of disheartening to think we've been doing this for 208 years...

Or encouraging. This is part of a free society. I'd rather we had the freedom to be sleazy than no freedom at all.

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Faith and The X-Files

04 Aug 2008 06:28 pm

The newest version of Chris Carter's franchise has baffled critics and audiences. Maybe they didn't realize that Carter has gotten more attuned to faith since the last movie.

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The Petraeus Effect

04 Aug 2008 06:08 pm

Fred Kaplan notices a very encouraging sign of cultural reform in the army: the new generals.

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Obama's Worst Idea Yet

04 Aug 2008 05:32 pm

This whole idea of taxing the oil companies on a "windfall" profit in order to shovel money to potential voters is pretty dreadful. It's up there with the gas tax holiday in the so-dumb-it-has-to-poll-well category. Of course, McCain's emphasis on domestic drilling - did everyone in the GOP get the same memo? - is almost as lame. McCain's speech today embracing an all-of-the-above approach to energy independence nonetheless struck me as a sensible theme. And when you look at all of Obama's energy proposals, they're not as bad as that headline pander might suggest. This news is depressing, however:

The Washington Post reported that McCain received $1.1 million from oil and gas industry executives and employees in June -- three-quarters of which came after he called for lifting the ban on offshore drilling on June 16.

Still, I'm not sure there's a huge amount of difference between the two on energy policy at this point, especially when you consider both are for cap-and-trade (I've become disenchanted with that option) and will be managing a much more Democratic Congress.

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Unstarry Night, Ctd

04 Aug 2008 05:25 pm

A reader writes:

Your item about the Undark Night, Ctd. reminded me of this great quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. I think of it almost every night when I enjoy the dark skies around my home in Vermont:

"If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and stare.”

By the way, here's an astonishing video computer trip inside Van Gogh's masterpiece, if you missed it the first time.

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The NYT From Beijing

04 Aug 2008 04:40 pm

They just blew a confidential source, according to Fallows. It tells you something that the main terrorist threat to the Chinese government is Islamist. I'd bookmark Jim now if I were you if you want the best take on the Olympics.

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Obama's Birthday

04 Aug 2008 04:39 pm

Is anyone as unsurprised as I am that he's a Leo?

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Mental Health Break

04 Aug 2008 04:20 pm

Ptown's resident v-jay, Tom Yaz, played this earlier this season at the weekly variety-drag show here and I forgot to post it. Dan Savage beat me to it. The lip-syncing is marvelous:

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